Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to image processing on photographed data taken by an image pickup apparatus, and in particular to an image processing apparatus and an image processing method which are capable of adaptively reflecting a dynamic range, which is stored as photographed data, to a developing result according to the photographed data, as well as a storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
In image pickup apparatuses such as digital cameras, a brightness adjustment is made to automatically correct the tone of photographed data to a target tone. For example, there is known a technique to analyze the tone and others of a dark part and a bright part in photographed data and automatically correct tone so that the overall photographed data can have a suitable tone. Specifically, there has been proposed a method in which, when the brightness of an object to be taken has changed, tone is corrected so that the object to be taken can be displayed with a predetermined brightness (see, for example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2002-359773). There has also been proposed a method in which for photographed data, tone is corrected based on a reference value of exposure for shooting (see, for example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2005-268952).
However, the techniques described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2002-359773 and Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2005-268952 present a problem that the atmosphere of an image in shooting is damaged because the overall brightness is corrected to a large extent in some scenes.